John Cook, CEO, Strategic Growth Partners
Every year, successful commercial companies look at the federal market and see the same thing: a customer that spends hundreds of billions of dollars annually, pays its bills, and signs multi-year agreements. They see stability their commercial revenue can’t match. So they decide to enter GovCon.Â
And most of them get it wrong, not because they lack capability, but because they assume the skills that built their commercial business will transfer. After 30 years in this market, I can tell you: they don’t. GovCon isn’t a new sales channel. It’s a different business.Â
Here’s what commercial leaders need to understand before they invest a dollar in federal pursuit.Â
1. This is not commercial sales
In the commercial world, a great product, a sharp pitch, and a motivated sales team can win business in a quarter. In the federal market, the sale often happened before you knew the opportunity existed.Â
Government buying is relationship-driven, compliance-heavy, and slow by design. The companies winning consistently are the ones closest to the customer before the RFP ever drops — shaping requirements, building trust, and demonstrating capability while the need is still being defined. If your first contact with an opportunity is reading the solicitation on SAM.gov, you’re not competing. You’re donating proposal dollars to the incumbent.Â
Commercial entrants routinely underestimate this timeline. Plan for 18 to 24 months from serious market entry to meaningful revenue. Companies that budget for six months burn their capital, their patience, and their executive sponsorship — usually in that order.Â
 2.Eligibility is not access.
The second mistake is believing that qualifying for the market is the same as entering it. Commercial companies discover set-asides and certifications and assume they’ve found a shortcut. They haven’t.Â
Certifications create opportunity. They don’t create success. I’ve watched companies spend a year winning a designation, then wonder why the phone isn’t ringing. The answer is that eligibility has never mattered less. What matters is access: the right contract vehicles, relevant past performance, and real agency relationships. You can be perfectly qualified for an opportunity and completely locked out of it because you’re not on the vehicle the agency uses to buy. That’s not a paperwork problem. It’s infrastructure — and it has to be built early and deliberately.Â
The market is also shifting under everyone’s feet. As FAR-based contracting becomes more restrictive, non-traditional vehicles — OTAs, CSOs, and their cousins — are growing fast. Commercial companies, ironically, are often well positioned for these pathways. But only if they know the pathways exist and build a strategy around them, rather than defaulting to the crowded, full-and-open front door.Â
3.Infrastructure before revenue. Â
The most expensive mistake I see is chasing revenue before building the back office to support it. A commercial company wins its first federal contract, celebrates — and then meets DCAA-compliant accounting, federal invoicing, security requirements, and contract administration for the first time, mid-performance.Â
Win work you can’t support and you don’t just lose money on that contract. You damage the only asset that compounds in this market: past performance. Your reputation is bruised before you ever scale, and in a market this small, agencies talk.Â
Winning a contract is not success. Profitable delivery is. That distinction should shape your entire entry strategy — including which opportunities you walk away from.Â
The good news: you don’t have to build it alone.
If this sounds like an argument to stay out of the federal market, it isn’t. The opportunity is real, and commercial companies bring innovation and delivery discipline that government customers genuinely need. But the entrants who succeed share a posture: they treat GovCon as a market to invest in, not a channel to test.Â
That means resourcing the entry properly — and it means recognizing that the fastest-growing new entrants don’t build everything internally. They leverage fractional G&A, experienced partners, and proven playbooks instead of learning a 40-year-old regulatory environment through trial and error. Capital strategy matters here too: growth in GovCon requires runway, and the companies that scale have figured out how to fund the next opportunity without waiting on the last award.Â
So before you chase your first federal contract, do the unglamorous work. Slow down. Build the back office. Align your BD strategy around access, not eligibility. Secure the right vehicles and partnerships before you pursue volume.Â
It’s simple. It’s not easy. But it’s the difference between companies that enter this market and companies that last in it.Â
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John Cook is CEO of Strategic Growth Partners, a full-lifecycle, AI-enabled growth partner for government contractors. SGP helps clients get to revenue faster, reduce barriers to entry, and scale efficiently through an integrated shared-services model that covers market entry, business development, back-office support, and M&A growth expansion. With fractional experts, entrepreneurial agility, and strategic partnerships, SGP delivers the capacity and confidence to compete and win across both federal and state markets.Â
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